Doing automatically controlled systems was still possible before computers just that it required a bit more creative use of analog components.
I think that it's important to note here that this was the set of problems that computer science researchers didn't know how to solve.
In the early days, they mostly ended up re-inventing statistical methods.
And to be fair, a neural net is just a bunch of linear models joined by a non-linearity. In that case, it's essentially stacked logistic regression, which was invented before computers.
Nobody did this before computers though.
> . In that case, it's essentially stacked logistic regression, which was invented before computers.
It isn't "basically logistic regression", it is just a technique which uses logistic regressions. The full technique is ML. If you remove the ML parts it is basically just logistic regression left though.
I think this would probably be a more profitable discussion if you could define Machine Learning for me.
How does your evidence support your claim?